Face-to-face or face-to-screen: A quantitative comparison of conferences modalities.

ABSTRACT: The COVID-19 pandemic forced a societal shift from in-person to virtual activities, including scientific conferences. As society navigates a "new normal," the question arises as to the advantages and disadvantages of these alternative modalities. We introduce two new comprehensive datasets enabling direct comparison between virtual and in-person conferences: the first, from a series of nine small conferences, encompasses over 12,000 pairs of potential scientific collaborators across five virtual and four in-person meetings on a range of scientific topics; the expressed goal of these conferences is to create novel collaborations. The second dataset, from a series of three large physics conferences, encompasses >250,000 possible pairs of scientific collaborators. Our study provides quantitat

SUBMITTER: Zajdela ER 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11671225 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature